Leonardo da Vinci. Art & Science Then & Now
Exhibited at the University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG),University of Hong Kong, T. T. Tsui Building,Hong Kong
September 2019
City University of Hong Kong is proud to present 12 original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, brought to Hong Kong for the first time to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death. Leonardo was a scientist, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, mathematician, and even musician, but he was first and foremost a polymath inventor and creator. Whether looking at plants, musical harmonies, or elliptical curves of cannon balls, Leonardo was fascinated by the world around him, and devoted his life to exploring and transcribing it. His indiscriminate love for and exploration of the diversity of human and natural knowledge—arts, humanities, sciences and technology—turned him into the exemplar of what is now called a Renaissance man.
In tribute to Leonardo’s continuing influence, nine contemporary artists (eight based in Hong Kong) produced new artworks imagining what Leonardo might have done in an era of digital media and virtual reality. Combining new and old media, the artists respond to his ideas on flight, movement, light, and the act of drawing itself. Fully embedded in contemporary technology, these pieces nonetheless hark back in startlingly direct ways to the legacies of Leonardo’s drawings, paintings, and unlimited curiosity. Please note: all the drawings in the Exhibition Catalogue, unless otherwise stated, are from the Biblioteca and Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan.
Melted Proportions
The Franciscan friar, Luca Pacioli (ca. 1445-1509) is best known for his obsession with the mathematical rhythms and geometrical interdependencies behind platonic solids and their extension into polyhedral forms. He collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci in his work De Divina Proportione (1509), for which daVinci drew sixty image plates describing the “ golden proportions” within the solids and polyhedra. In this project, I have set out to disrupt, extend,evolve, juxtapose, and melt the stringent proportions of Pacioli’s Duodecedron Abscisus Elevatus Solidus,consisting of 120 equilateral triangles.
I construct an argument through five iterative 5 works. Each individually showing a frozen state of a transformation of the Renaissance obsession of the golden proportions into a contemporary post-digital irrational geometry.Together the five works build up a gradient transition to set out a new formal grammar.In the production of this work, I combined topological modelling operations with intuitive surface deformations, melting the strictly logical into the apparently random, resulting in sculptures that seem to recall natural formations, and their translations as frivolities and voluptuous, ornamented exuberance.